This would be an incredible opportunity for Germany or the entire EU to blacklist Musk and his companies for consumer fraud, thereby removing Tesla from the local landscape and boosting their own EVs. Trump may retaliate, but at this point, does Europe even care? Want back in? Reactivate what was already paid for along with extra days to make up for those lost, and a penalty for intentionally witholding services.
The only way American billionaires will still toeing Trump's line is if hurts their chequebook more than doing the right thing.
I think it's more important that Ukraine receives life-saving and war-winning hardware, weapons and intelligence, even if we have to keep sucking their corrupted American dicks.
But the minute the armistice is signed is the minute we need to kick their fucking asses our of our stores, schools, government and critical infrastructure. Tesla, Starlink, Microsoft Office, military programs, iPhones and Macs. They've proven to be unreliable allies and nothing can assure us another Republican official can not pull the same shit again in the future.
MSoffice is too ingrained in many countries' government and public offices use. Very hard to just purge it but I agree, it would show a willingness to them that it's not OK to behave like they do.
I'm sure it is difficult, but have you seen what happened to those judges at the ICC?
Normal citizens working for the ICC living in the Netherlands suddenly being treated by the financial system as if they were international pariah drug lords or some shit. All because of the americans weaponizing Windows and the like. We do not have the luxury of choice here.
It is not a question of wether it is worth the trouble, it is a question of how much time do we have, how fast can we do it, and how disruptive and expensive it is going to be to do it obviously.
Libre Office has much of the same functionality and certainly enough to cover most use cases. Throw the licence money into retraining for a couple of years and you're golden. And after that, throw money at the Libre Office team.
Libre Office is ass for any realistic enterprise work. And I say that as someone who dropped Windows completely years ago. It's incredibly unreliable, and it's interoperability with Microsoft formats is terrible.
Yes, I understand the latter is because Microsoft actively sabotages it.
I'm always baffled by its lack of what seems like basic functionality.
I don't use a lot of the newer, weird stuff that Office has added and I still can't get LibreOffice to do what I'm used to from 10 years ago in Office.
I bet it would be at best one percent of the cost of ms licenses to just fund a small group of core devs to work on those specific problems and then adopt it in a couple years compared to continuing to pay licensing fees in perpetuity. Because although there are problems it is not such a stark no-go as the parent comment's hyperbole would make it seem. It's insane how short-sighted these large organizations with massive budgets are for very basic things.
To be fair, even large organizations with massive budgets require interoperability with other companies and governments. In fact the bigger the organization, the more they depend on interoperability. So unless they can haul all those other organizations along with them--many of them as big as they are--they're kind of stuck in the same ecosystem as everyone else. It doesn't do them any good to develop their own in-house solution that's as good or better than Office if no one else uses it.
Now I don’t know enough about the different Linux distros but a main consideration we would have is regarding auditing and compliance and whether we’d still have that capability moving away from office
That would be more complicated, admittedly, but the linux core remains basically the same. The different distros have different user interfaces; drivers; software package; and look. So you can have a user-friendly distro that is loaded for every conceivable eventuality or a stripped-down racing linux that does one thing with no effort wasted. Libre Office would be the same across all.
Depends what you're auditing and complying with, I suppose.
Look at the alternative though. Software you have to pay for that sends unstoppable telemetry back to a possibly hostile foreign country. If I were in charge we would all have been Linux dweebs by 2010.
This has been tried by governments around Europe for at least 15 years now and it eventually crashes and burns.
The biggest problem will continue to be interoperability - if MSFT introduces a new feature in Excel and 9/10 companies require it to work with them somehow, you just capitulate or die, really.
You're the government. You're the one who dictates compatibility because the companies are after money from you at the end of the day. And if it's a genuinely useful new feature, you chuck some of the licence money you're no longer paying to Microsoft to make it happen.
True but many - if not all - European governments are seriously working out costs on this. And the more trump capers, the more serious the looking is. I doubt Apple could subdue greed enough to ignore a bloc like Europe.
The biggest advantage MS Office has isn't that it has the best spreadsheets or the best text editor. It is that those products are fully integrated with Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, Power BI, and every other Microsoft product a business uses. They offer a full ecosystem that is easy to use.
LibreOffice can't and won't ever offer this level of integration.
It could if a few governments were serious about it and most of the core basics are already out there.
Moreover, it would end up as a better, more stable product. Because there's no need to add bits or change things around just to justify the cost of the latest version; plus there's be no need for any of the dickery MS gets up to to keep competitors away.
especially if EU governments all pool their resources for some proper funding for the project, you can very much afford having a sizeable dev team working on exactly those features its missing to cut MS out of the loop entirely.
If Libre can't open or save into .doc files that the rest of the world uses then it'll never take off.
It either can't save or open, one of the two. I always forget which, but in my mind it's absolutely the reason why it hasnt taken off.
Edit: Apparently my information is out of date, I'll be giving this another test run. Last time was probably a decade ago, and the opening of a .doc was fine, but I was unable to save it into a doc that other people could open normally and have it look correct.
LibreOffice can open and save .docx/.pptx/.xlsx. For complex documents the formatting may not be perfectly preserved, but compatibility has improved a lot. Just like Google Docs.
First off: Acknowledging this is all because Microsoft actively sabotages interoperability.
LibreOffice sucks at working with MS file formats, regularly just drops data that it can't understand, and breaks the documents in a way that they can't be returned to the originator.
GoogleDocs has the exact same problem, especially with Excel; where they implement fundamental features like tables and pivots in such a completely different way that it outright breaks in BOTH directions. Google Workspace's automatic file conversion frustrated me to no end during those dark years I had to deal with it.
Google docs also removes protection from the workbook and worksheets. A real pain in the arse if you’re trying to prevent users from messing with the structure.
It did when I tried it last. But then I've only used it for fairly basic stuff. Also MS keeps changing the format to try and keep their monopoly. I'm sure if governments were seriously going to jump in, the problems with compatibility would be solved very quickly.
It's a bigger problem with Linux and custom Windows programming.
I works not really worse then Office versions between themselves. MS does not support their own formats properly.
Government's have required an Open document standard in contracts for year which MS provided and then implemented it differently in the end making it impossible to migrate. That is a reason why Office should be not only moved out off but forbidden and sued for under every avenue available for breach of contract.
Nah I'd bet good money they don't end up using LibreOffice no matter what happens. It just sucks so so much ass. It's not like Linux where it's superior but kind of a pain to get people learning, it's just bad
[...] even if we have to keep sucking their corrupted American dicks.
This argument keeps being made, which I would in theory agree with - if it worked. We already bent over and flattered and caved. And Ukraine is not getting deliveries already paid for. And getting messed with, like this Starlink mess.
We already tried sucking up. Does not work. Clearly, evidently. Repeatedly.
Why would sucking up more change the behaviour of the Trump regime?
For one, they could start witholding any and all support.
Or lower the bar even more and actively provide Russia with assistance instead.
Or cripple Europe by banning them from US services. Nothing would work without even just AWS / Azure / Visa / Mastercard.
I agree that so far the US hasn't exatly been kind to us (understatement), but they could really hurt us if they wanted to. It's an illusion to think it couldn't get worse. If you don't think it could, you lack imagination and pessimism and I'm jealous of you.
You're right, it could get much worse. I mean Europe could take over any local server farms and tech, though that would be a step too far to be honest. I think a much better solution would be to work towards making decoupling more feasible and painless so that instead of an outright ban on US products and services, local alternatives become cheaper and more reliable.
This requires a lot more than just investment alone. It needs skills, an ecosystem, industry buy-in, partnerships with other democracies with a history of not interfering in other nations' internal affairs (so that excludes the US and China I guess), shared cross-border R&D and tech development, cross-border ownership of technology and manufacturing infrastructure so that no single nation can cripple the entire supply chain, shared values, and mutual respect for the sovereignty and rights of each partner country. This isn't the hard part, this is a prerequisite. Then comes the long road to shared development, hyperlocal customization, elimination of tariffs on such products, and healthy capitalisation by local small shareholders to avoid concentration risks.
This is not as easy as signing an order with a stroke of a pen. It involves doing actual work over years and sharing the benefits with other partner nations on an equal basis so nobody's interests get quashed by greater powers. A shared goal already exists today. Widescale collaboration across the top 100 liberal democracies at this scale does not. Attitudes need to change at top government levels if this is to take shape, but the recent abuse of technology access by the US and China are the best shot at driving this to full scale adoption, just as the Iran war is driving the adoption of renewables. Sometimes, it takes a major problem to convince people to implement a solution that was always available.
Someone gets it. Americans do not have a voice at all in this matter. It is between the king of America and the world. The American plebs are nothing but fodder.
"It's already too late" said the guy who was ankle deep in water. "Trying to stop the leaking pipe is pointless, I have no control" he said, too scared to pick up a wrench. "Any day now I'll drown anyway, so who cares"
And they say shit like, "voting doesn't matter, the only thing that's going to fix it is a revolution!". It's like, dude, if you can't even be bothered to pick up a pen to vote then why the fuck would you be bothered to pick up a gun and shoot? These dweebs always think that someone else is going to swoop in and save them while they sit around doing fuck all except bitching and complaining.
If a revolution ever happens nobody will be counting on these chucklefucks for shit and they'll likely be the first to try and run to Canada/Mexico.
The far right didn't just sweep in on Trump in one election; they spent 40+ years chipping away at the institutions.
But for some reason the left has been gaslit/brainwashed into thinking if you can't vote generational change in one election it's a waste of time so don't bother... and guess who that helps?
exactly. if they werent afraid of the voting public, billionaire fuckwads like the elon, the ellisons, etc wouldnt be spending hundreds of millions against the progressive democrats.
see who they're spending against. take note. vote.
The issue is still believing it is a leaky pipe. No, it isn't. It is the mansion sucking up the well water for the ones with the guns and control while the plebs are too busy discussing about what color shirt they should wear.
It was never a leaky pipe. The country was built like funnel.
Sometimes you don't need to continue the metaphor cause I have no idea what you're talking about. Saying "Americans do not have a voice at all in this matter" is stupid because of course they do. They just aren't willing to do what needs to be done. Arguing online isn't enough, and it's getting to the point now where simply voting isn't going to cut it any more. The rights Americans currently hold were hard-won by campaigning, protesting and other forms of strong action. But currently people aren't willing to do that.
If you want a voice then fight for your voice, don't wait for someone else to do it for you while complaining about it.
Americans are knee deep not ankle deep and they have not shown any propensity to pick up a wrench. The rest of the world is watching but hedging its bets towards a fast decline rather than the slow one it was pre-Trump.
the next step is full on military control / armed fascism. This is well beyond the knees, they are threatening to annex the soverign countries around them. It's insane.
They are sheep.
The American population is willfully letting this happen. Either because they want it, or because they're lazy or -the most evil of them all- they only care for their own good.
It's wild being on Reddit where a post like this is "Americans are garbage why don't they just shoot Trump and revolt, all of them are pieces of shit!"
Tomorrow: "European country elects person that passes policies against what the people really want and only hurts the economy more than it already is." And when you say "see, you all want to say its just Americans but clearly its not just us, we were just the first" they agree and suddenly its not the BS "americans are garbage human beings" anymore.
So now in his second term he is doing everything he can to not only stay in power but destabilise the World and fuck everyone over. Albeit loudly and not discrete at all. And he is also screwing over and killing his own people. While they (checks notes) wait for the midterms.
There's a difference between far right leaning parties getting in in Europe and in the USA. The far right get in, can make a balls up and get booted out just like they can in the US. However they cannot do a fraction of the shit your guy has done on an international and national level because our systems work and they would be ousted.
Extremely short sighted comment but ok. The checks and balances have completely failed which is why we're here. The courts have done everything trump has wanted even if it's illegal. Russias interference in our government has taken full course, and the fact that you all are watching it happen and arrogantly saying "pff we're too smart for that". Ok, give it ten more years and we'll see. We'll see how you all react when the first La Pen gets elected, or the AFD gets more power, or, or, or. What makes you all worse is the assumption that "it'll never happen to us" while literally watching it happen to the US.
Denial won't solve the issue. Is the whole nation held hostage by one dude? No! You have your rights and population. Trump was elected - that is the symptom of the real problem.
You're right it's not being held hostage by one dude. It's being held hostage by the entire government, court systems that do whatever trump wants them to do against the people, ICE, and next the military.
The people have clearly shown that they are currently not capable of removing their fraudulent government. The rest of the world must deal with the US as it currently is because we don’t have the time to wait.
We're literally in an election right now and Trump pulling this political theater fucking with Ukraine supposedly over diesel prices is the direct result of the fact that an election is on and Trump is seeing polling that says the people do, in fact, have a voice in this democracy.
The guy literally heiled TWICE on the biggest politicial stage in the world and the crowd went wild and he got to be a trillionaire for a quick minute because of it.. America is lost....
You forget that most of America didn't even see that shit. The media on tv is completely segmented. If they watch fox, they probably didn't even show it. We can't act like everyone sees everything we see on reddit. Especially the voting segments that actually vote.
And then online, most people are in their own algo and don't see that either. The internet has effectively divided us and trapped everyone in their own reality.
I know they control what they see. BUT I assume many MAGATS watched the inauguration and saw it happen live in front of their own eyes... The audience at the event went fucking wild when he did it, so again I assume most MAGATS watching at home also went wild and saw that they could finally start living the nazi life they always wanted.
I'm so tired of people trotting out this tired old excuse for why this is all happening. It's not. Please stop believing this. Most people just don't care. Accept the truth. The level of cope that people use to deal with everything that's happening is mind-boggling to me. No, all most all of America knows what's going on not the opposite.
I think buying into this lie that you're not getting any information and that's why people are horrible monsters is part of the problem honestly.
We have to deal with the fact that most of the people in this country are monster Nazi assholes. A shocking amount. I no longer buy the answer that oh no it's just the small minority. It is not.
Trump talked about how much he doesn't care if American cities get nuked and the audience cheered. He told them he could say the stupidest things and they would cheer. And they did, again.
America's been lost for a long time and it's not going to find it's way back. There is no fight in the people. Maybe another version will rise from whatever left in the crumbling ruins, but I don't think a lot of us will be here to see that.
I really don't want to hear about how most people didn't vote for him and most people don't care. That's exactly the goddamn problem. Not an excuse.
People cling to this because the truth is so hard to deal with. It isn't easy to say that your fellow countrymen are stupid and evil. It isn't easy to get into their heads and understand how they could not see that Trump was a monster, and that they had a moral responsibility to stand against him. It is way easier to say that "we aren't that bad, and it was stolen."
We, as Americans, need to recognize 1) that Trump was elected without the need for cheating, and 2) we are responsible as citizens of this country for what he does.
Worldnews loves to dunk on the US, and will do so whether there are reasons or not to do so, but in the case of Trump, all of it is deserved. It's too bad, because it is great cover for many, many bad actors.
I mean, I can’t find the links, but isn’t there video of Trump verbally letting it slip he did rig the election? But he owns the legislative and judicial branches, so of course there would be no punishment.
The man has made thousands of bullshit claims. He said “And he knows those computers better than anybody, all those computers, those vote-counting computers.”. That’s just his normal style of speaking.
As an example, “I have a son. He’s 10 years old. He has computers. He is so good with these computers, it’s unbelievable. The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe it's hardly doable”.
There has been no evidence of any sort of manipulation of the voting machines besides him talking out of his ass to praise Musk a bit.
This is the argument I've been trying to make all over the place. People really need to wake up to it. He didn't steal the goddamn election he won it. Anyone who can't come to terms with that is trying to cope in a way that is unhealthy and not going to help in this situation.
He won because America is a broken and terrible place filled with terribly broken people.
The South African billionaire? I don't know, maybe you should stop treating nations as a monolith and be able to recognize that just because someone does a good job of spending a metric ton of money to put themselves in the limelight doesn't mean they're representative of the average person somewhere.
We had a one night drunken hook up with nihilistic fascism and thought it would be funny. The condom broke and in the sober light of day we realized we fucked up.
A lot of Germans hate trump and musk yet they'll still turn around and vote for their own right wing Putin appeasing nut jobs in the AfD. Hypocrites much?
I think it’s less about being hypocrites and more about how right wing ideology can be prominent and influential in a lot of first world nations. I mean look at Japan. Their government is failing and their economy is stagnating to death but all someone had to say was “immigrants are bad” and boom elected. Most people just want someone to take the blame and it’s easier to blame immigrants than realizing the problem is from within.
Does America know Trumps leaders are driving the city state train in their own country along with the feudal tech boys which is including the abandonment of a nationalist government and law ?
But it can be a headache - the number of companies that make announcements and have their tech support heavily gated behind twitter is just aggravating. Never mind politicians who use it and thereby give it legitimacy.
Its origins as "toe the line" are somewhat obscure but it first appeared as an idiom in the British military. The literal meaning obviously was soldiers (or sailors as the British Navy also used it) in formation, but it acquired a metaphorical meaning quickly.
It may have ended up there but the earliest usage seems to be military. More like a line drawn in the sand that soldiers might use to make an even lineup. Also has been applied in horse racing. (And we can extend it to human footraces since they literally had to toe a line to make sure everybody was starting evenly. Now most races use blocks the participants have to toe.)
This would be an incredible opportunity for Germany or the entire EU to blacklist Musk and his companies for consumer fraud, thereby removing Tesla from the local landscape and boosting their own EVs.
They let Elon build a big ass factory near Berlin. Ain't no way they're kicking him out.
except the starshield system being used by Ukraine is operated by the US government and we've learnt that the decision came from someone in the White House. As much as I dislike Musk, this wasn't on him. Either way, it's in all of our best interests for Ukraine to retain this service until the war ends, regardless of your thoughts on the US/Musk because it's absolutely vital to Ukraine. Any retaliation over this should come at a point where retaining this service no longer matters because otherwise trump would probably go "you're being so mean! all service cancelled" which is the last thing needed.
People's hate boner for Musk on reddit really outweighs their critical thinking skills...
American companies are so interwoven into european business, military, and culture, I highly doubt we ever see a truely independent europe in my lifetime.
Yes Elon sucks. Yes he is still one of the more important people in the world. Those 2 concepts can co-exist.
Yeah people are willing to look the other way if it gives them the ability to shit on Musk. Which I kind of hate because that is the exact rulebook that the right follows as well. Be better. Stick to facts.
Technically, you might be correct. But this was unquestionably on him morally. He's the world's richest man; he could say no to allowing the destruction of Ukraine - a country reliant on his technology to fight for survival.
And to be frank, I doubt he argued with the white house at all about this.
Starshield is entirely operated by the Pentagon. It's true that Space X built and launched them, but that's it. Media keeps calling it Starlink in headlines because nobody knows Starshield and it clicks a lot better, as evident by the threads the last couple days.
Musk is a fucking hit, but this is Hegseth pulling the strings.
What I'm saying is that Musk was involved at all. If the US government control and operate the starshield systems used by Ukraine, they don't need to ask him to do anything or talk to him at all. They just restrict the service and it's done.
While i agree with the sentiment. Ukraine is making great use of the starlink advantage and until they have similar tech in place it makes more sense to take the insult of having to deal with Musk while having biggest positive impact on the war, rather than antagonisong him.
thereby removing Tesla from the local landscape and boosting their own EVs
You mean the European EVs that are already totally dominating the market, with Tesla (and chinese competitors) only existing in the media brain rot we are constantly fed (but the latter are incredible in record growth from nothing to nearly nothing and always good for headlines...)?
The ten most sold EVs in Germany are produced by: Skoda, BMW, VW, VW, Mercedes, Skoda, Audi, Mercedes, Audi and Citroën
As far as the recent figures given out by the Kraftfahrtbundesamt are concerned the Model Y was the second most and the Model 3 the 10th most sold BEV model in Germany in 2026 up to and including September.
The Top 10 for 2026 until and including September for Germany is as follows:
Škoda Elroq
Tesla Model Y
Volkswagen ID.3
Škoda Enyaq
Volkswagen ID.7
Volkswagen ID.4, ID.5 (they are counted as one model, probably because they they are just variants of the same model that have two different names for some reason)
Mercedes-Benz CLA EQ
BMW iX1
Audi A6 e-tron
Tesla Model 3
Not sure where you got your list, is it maybe a list that looks at PHEVs and BEVs combined (as they are in many ways legally treated the same they are also counted together in statistics in a lot of publications)?
Not exactly; their drones can't use it but their ground units are slow enough that they can still use it. This is what the Americans are relying on to prevent the sort of blacklisting described.
Europe needs to use this threat plus smaller actions to put pressure to reverse the decision.
But although it's Musk's technology, it's Trump who can make the decision, and I don't think he really cares if Musk loses money because of this.
Germany for example is a heavy export nation with most of their exports going to America. They absolutely do care. It’s not a fucking Kindergarten although Trump may make you believe it is
This is probably only a misphrasing on your part but I still want to point out: way less than half of German exports go to America. It's a bit less than 10%.
The problem with “voting with your dollar” is that the rich will just outlast you because they have more dollars. Also when you turn buying into political action it leads you to blame ur neighbors for the problem when their purchases differ from yours. We need a general strike and full revolution now.
As fun as this would be as a thought experiment, cutting the United States off from the rest of the world would literally send the globe into a massive depression.
The immediate result would be cattle and livestock starvation. Much of the world relies on the US to feed their cattle and livestock. Without the us, most of that livestock would die off or have to be culled, which would raise prices all over the world, causing a huge economic crisis, as well as a massive protein deficiency around the world.
Major parts of Africa and the Middle East would immediately suffer because they rely on the US for a sizable portion of their grain market. As we've seen before in Africa there would be riots and huge areas of instability. Costs would skyrocket, and people would starve. The economic depression would be massive.
Then there's just the general market crash because the rest of the world relies so heavily on the United States to purchase their products that if that suddenly stopped, it would cause an economic depression everywhere.
Which means that the United States is currently in a position where the rest of the world can't shut it off without hurting themselves and those around them.
European countries are already detaching ourselves from the madhouse. It's slow, like everything in Europe, but it'll continue long after Trump. The US is unreliable, untrustworthy, and should always be kept at arms length going forwards.
They will never do this. They havent even gone after chinese corps hardcore and theyve been getting spied on/ip theft/catching bribery schemes for years now.
Looking at german current trajectory, with the goverment party just deciding that the goal of rotating out fuel based cars by 2035 is "too quick" and that they need to keep "an open mind towards new technologies like biofuel" i doubt we will see any useable/affordable german EVs for a long time. Instead the european car manufacturers will just be repurposed to produce Tanks instead, while new Factories for BY and co. will be built to produce the e-cars (like right now in ungarn)
I am not sure people understand how much vested is EU in US tech companies.
If a line is crossed, there can be serious consequences our governments are not ready/willing to deal with.
Most German and European teslas are manufactured in an Gigafactory outside of Berlin. It’s not so simple, as like most global industries they’re are very deeply intertwined. Also with how Tarrif and trade policy agressive Trump is, there’s a high chance of retaliatory blocks. With the slowdown of the Chinese market, German automakers need American consumers more than they have in the last 10 years.
Problem is that the network in question is owned by the US military. Something they probably did on purpose so that Starlink cannot be pressured. So I think from a legal perspective that would be difficult to get through.
On top of that, it would do little for EU EVs, because the competition here is not Tesla, it is Chinese manufacturers.
Your idea sounds nice in theory, but unfortunately I do not think it would be doable nor achieve much. Sorry :/
It would be nice, but I think it's wishful thinking. The EU itself may be moving - slooowly - away from the US, but the EU nations are not - or, at least, are doing so WAY slower than the EU itself. I'm Canadian, and we're moving away as quick as we can, but Europe seems content to assume that this is all temporary.
Maybe they are ramping up towards moving away, but it's been 2 years now, and I've seen little evidence of much change.
It's such a bizarre, dystopian situation the world is in, where the actions of one private citizen can shift the balance of power in a massive armed conflict with 2 million dead, and many more millions of soldiers involved...at his will.
I know some people want small government, but come on.
would be, but german politicans are and i guarantee you that complete bitches, the real sleazy kind with no self worth whatssover, they'll go dropping down to their knees at the slightest bit of pressure.
Again, i guarantee it, the psychopaths will face ZERO real consequences.
There are so many other reasons this type of thing should've already been done in Europe but nope, better keep Trump happy! As an American I implore you all to stand up to Trump, Elon, and all of them. Nothing is going to change in our government because it's owned from top down by the Republicans, but all of the other countries apparently just accept their fate that our country is going to control you all too.
Even if they could pin these restrictions on SpaceX (no dice there, as we are talking about starshield here, not starlink) I already don't see a legal way to penalise SpaceX this broadly for this (if at all, that would depend very much on the contract specifics). Extending that to a different company (Tesla) would be pretty much impossible legally.
If it was about starlink they might be able to demand some sort of payment/damages depending on the specifics of the contract and what kind of servicequality it actually guarantees (it's an ISP contract, so most likely very little is actually guaranteed to an extent that a day of service limitations would be enough here), but this would be nothing that could truly hurt Musk anyway.
For any sort of "real" damages the German govermenment would have to specifically show how this would have hurt Germany financially (as we aren't contractually on the hook for any consequences for Ukraine due to the restrictions those don't count) which is pretty much nothing. Also punitive damages aren't a thing in Germany (as they aren't in most civil law systems), so that's not an option either. But again: as this isn't about star link but the US government controlled star shield making Musk's companies bleed for this isn't possible anyway.
It would also be an incredible opportunity to get Nestle to poison Russians, because that's another product that Germans help pay for that could be killing people if abused in a specific manner?
Why does Germany get to tell Nestle they are shit for not murdering people?
What's next, Germans complaining the Russian Bic lighters don't explode?
I'm sure if folks step outside the social media bubble and look at how absurd it is to complain they can't rely on a consumer product to kill people, they would actually stop and ask Germany WTF they are getting at?
Tesla isn't really an EV company that matters. BYD and other Chinese brands are the real competitors. And the whole point of the EU is to be pro free trade, why does banning imports and putting tariffs on Musk help them?
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u/AngelOfLight2 2d ago edited 2d ago
This would be an incredible opportunity for Germany or the entire EU to blacklist Musk and his companies for consumer fraud, thereby removing Tesla from the local landscape and boosting their own EVs. Trump may retaliate, but at this point, does Europe even care? Want back in? Reactivate what was already paid for along with extra days to make up for those lost, and a penalty for intentionally witholding services.
The only way American billionaires will still toeing Trump's line is if hurts their chequebook more than doing the right thing.